Contentions

There is appropriate horror being expressed today all over the blogosphere about the statement released by the radical leftist group called the Center for Constitutional Rights on the verdict in the Ghailani trial: “CCR questions the ability of anyone who is Muslim to receive a truly fair trial in any American judicial forum post-9/11,” it says. “However, on balance the Ghailani verdict shows that federal criminal trials are far superior to military commissions for the simple yet fundamental reason that they prohibit evidence obtained by torture. If anyone is unsatisfied with Ghailani’s acquittal on 284 counts, they should blame the CIA agents who tortured him.”

The astounding and vicious vulgarity of the sentiments expressed here — no Muslim can get a fair trial, anyone dissatisfied with the fact that a man who confessed to his role in the murder of 224 people has been acquitted of those killings should be more upset that the person who killed those people was treated roughly by agents of the U.S. government — tells you everything you need to know about the Center for Constitutional Rights. Atop a CCR website posting by a member of the organization’s board denouncing the guilty verdict and sentencing of Lynne Stewart, a lawyer who served as a courier for terrorist messages sent through her from her imprisoned client to his network, is a quote from Karl Marx: “At all times throughout history the ideology of the ruling class is the ruling ideology.” That same item described Stewart’s client, the “blind sheikh” Abdel Rahman, as “was the leading oppositionist to the U.S.-sponsored Mubarak dictatorship in Egypt,” whereas in fact what he did was oversee the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993.

The Lynne Stewart monstrousness is of a piece with the monstrous work done by CCR altogether. It is run by Michael Ratner, who conveniently espouses a hate-America and evils-of-capitalism philosophy even as he swims in his own family’s real estate billions. (His brother Bruce is, among other things, the Machiavellian developer of Atlantic Yards, the Brooklyn megaproject.) It is, and I say this advisedly, an evil organization. In the guise of protecting civil liberties, it uses the American legal system to attack the American political system and the American way of life. Its approach is to offer aggressively self-righteous defenses of the morally indefensible — i.e., the logic that says a waterboard is worse than a killing — in a classic bait-and-switch according to which any form of state action against anyone is unacceptable unless that person happens to be a cop, a soldier, or an official of the U.S. government, in which case he is guilty until proven innocent.

So while I share the disgust expressed by Benjamin Wittes, Tom Joscelyn, and others, it just seems all in a day’s work for the Center for Constitutional Rights, an organization whose loathing of America is exceeded only by its masterful exploitation and manipulation of America’s blessings.